The MT Position

Posted by Mark Foss

This week I’ll reflect on a few news items.

By now transit budget challenges are old news. Periodically, despite the budget, the reasons transit agencies spend money defy logic. The San Francisco Chronicle online reported that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is spending $800,000 essentially to define the phrase “major service change.” The headline is somewhat misleading, but the article has a point. The Federal Transit Administration denied BART $70 million in stimulus funds stating that the agency hadn’t considered the impact of higher fares and “major service changes” on low-income, minority and limited-English-speaking riders. BART appears to have gone over the top. They hired consultants, translators and held community meetings to define what people thought “major service change” meant. The expenditures included day care for people attending the community meetings. BART also hired two full-time staffers at a cost of about $200,000 per year.

Doesn’t this seem a bit sideways? The Fed gives then regulates it away. Were BART’s actions a management overreaction? Or was this justified fear of the federal big stick? You decide. It seems to me that there are more efficient ways to make sure the public is served.

While I was thinking about the BART article, I decided to read Mass Transit magazine’s cover story “Grand Vision”. In the article, Joe Szabo talks about a vision for high-speed rail. He talks about the issue of “self-sufficiency.” He points out that although no passenger rail system has operational self-sufficiency from farebox revenue, Amtrak recovers 75 percent. That is a better rate than the bus farebox recovery rate in King County Washington, which is about 20 percent (Regional Transit Task Force Meeting Summary, April 2010, p. 9).

Operationally self-sufficient or not, a maximum return on public investment should be the goal of transit agencies — rail or bus. A 2009 Federal Transit Administration case study “A Methodology Using Six Sigma for Heavy Rail Maintenance Programs” focuses on using a “proven methodology for increasing productivity (p. 1). The stated motivation is that transit projects should yield good returns. Demand for Six Sigma skills also appears in a procurement announcement for Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) in New York. The agency was looking for consultants able to use Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma tools. It will be interesting to see what effect the introduction of advanced management techniques has in the transit industry.

It is open to question, however, whether old management habits can be changed. If the FTA wants greater productivity and then regulates down to the town hall meeting level, it’s doubtful. The FTA spent a long time studying advanced management techniques to improve productivity in rail. The agency also sent BART into a frenzy causing $800,000 in spending over a customer service issue. On the surface the issues are quite different. Rail maintenance is a steady kind of operation. Customer relationship management is dynamic and changes rapidly. However, customer service can be managed more systematically than the BART story suggests it was.

Whatever is done about the transit budget crisis at the national level, management with better tools and methods should come first — and should continue after the crisis abates.

Mark Foss has more than 24 years experience working for King County Metro Transit. His experience includes work as a bus operator, special ridership coordinator in accessible services and 1st line transit supervisor. Currently, he works as a communications coordinator in the transit control center (TCC). Contact him via LinkedIn.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 8:36 am and is filed under On the Line. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.